Ulbat  Christianity  fia$  Done  for 

the  family. 

0 

By  Rev.  Samuel  W.  Dike,  LL.D., 

Secretary  of  the  National  Divorce  Reform  League. 

Y  article  will  not  be  devoted 
to  those  paeans  of  praise  that 
are  commonly  sung  on  the 
subject  before  us.  But  this 
will  not  be  because  there 
of  the  marvelous  transforma- 
Christianity  has  wrought  in 
the  family  as  a  social  institution,  though  I 
think  more  than  its  just  due  has  sometimes 
been  given  it.  I  do  not  see  how  it  is  pos¬ 
sible  for  a  candid  reader  to  compare  the 
domestic  life  of  the  Roman  world  of  the 
first  Christian  centuries  with  that  of  the 
early  Christians,  especially  as  the  teachings 
of  the  latter  disclose  their  ideals,  and  not 
feel  that  here  is  one  of  the  great  triumphs 
of  the  Founder  of  Christianity.  I  some¬ 
times  think,  after  considerable  study  of  the 
historic  and  present  place  of  the  family  in 
human  society,  as  sociology  sets  it  before 
us  in  the  new  light,  that  there  is  enough  in 
the  short  utterances  of  Christ  regarding  the 
family  to  put  him  at  the  head  of  all  think¬ 
ers  on  social  themes,  without  reference  to 
anything  else  that  he  ever  said  or  did. 


is  any  doubt 
tions  which 


But  what  did  he  do  ?  How  did  he  do 
it  ?  Then,  what  has  the  Christianity 
which  he  inspired  done  as  a  consequence 
of  what  its  Founder  said  about  the  family  ? 
And  in  what  way  has  this  been  accom¬ 
plished  ?  These  are  the  questions  I  care 
most  to  have  answered.  It  would  be  easy 
enough  to  fill  my  allotted  space  with  the 
usual  story  of  the  early  and  modern  tri¬ 
umphs  of  Christianity  in  behalf  of  the 
family  ;  but  no  recital,  however  eloquent, 
of  the  mere  effects  by  themselves,  or  in 
contrast  with  that  which  they  displaced, 
can  best  tell  the  story  of  a  work  planned 
for  the  entire  future  of  human  society. 
We  must  get  back  to  the  ideal,  note  the 
way  in  which  it  has  been  used  so  far,  and 
thus  try  to  see  the  lines  along  which  the 
future  will  carry  the  work.  In  this  way 
we  also  discover  more  clearly  the  real 
grandeur  of  the  structure.  The  completed 
plan  of  the  cathedral  means  more  than  the 
finished  part  can  tell  us  by  looking  at  that 
alone. 

mat  Tt  Did  not  Do. 

Now,  neither  early  Christianity  nor  its 
historic  Founder  created  the  monogamous 
family  which  we  know  so  well.  For, 
perhaps,  the  Western  world  never  saw  this 
type  of  the  family  in  more  vigorous  form, 
so  far  as  the  essentials  of  its  structure  go, 
than  among  the  early  Mediterranean 
peoples.  It  was  based  on  the  union  of 
one  man  and  one  woman  for  life.  Religion 


was  its  bond  and  inspiration,  "making  its 
common  meal  a  sacred  rite,  establishing  a 
domestic  altar,  and  consecrating  the  hearth 
and  family  tomb.  Property  inhered  in  the 
family  rather  than  in  the  individual.  In  a 
word,  the  entire  life  was  rooted  in  the 
home.  Not  even  the  Hebrew  family,  in 
its  best  days,  was  nearer  an  ideal  for  the 
times  in  structure  and  form,  or  better 
adapted  to  a  pure  and  vigorous  domestic 
life,  than  this  old  Roman  institution.  The 
superior  vitality  of  the  Hebrew  household 
lay  chiefly  in  the  unity  and  universality  of 
its  theistic  idea.  Rome  could  not  make 
the  transition,  as  its  civilization  developed, 
from  a  god  for  each  household  to  one  God 
for  all  the  people,  in  the  nation  and  the 
home  alike,  and  so  religion  lost  its  power 
to  sustain  both.  But  after  due  allowance 
for  the  exaggeration  of  the  critics  and  his¬ 
torians  regarding  early  Roman  and  Germanic 
domestic  life,  I  think  we  must  not  only 
concede  so  much  to  the  natural  strength 
and  vigor  of  the  domestic  structure  of  the 
early  Roman  world,  but  admit  that  probably 
something  of  it  continued  down  to  the 
time  of  early  Christianity,  and  sometimes 
became,  perhaps  more  frequently  than  we 
have  believed,  the  matrix  of  the  new  faith. 

Now  Christ  simply  pointed  back  through 
the  earliest  Jewish  history  or  tradition,  as 
the  case  may  be,  to  the  constitutional  pro¬ 
visions  of  nature  herself.  You  must,  he 
said,  for  substance,  go  behind  the  Mosaic 


3 


legislation,  useful  as  it  was  for  the  times, 
and  look  into  nature.  Here,  in  the  physi¬ 
cal  constitution  of  the  sexes,  in  the  conse¬ 
quent  demand  for  an  exclusive  affection  of 
two  souls  for  each  other,  and  in  the  unity 
that  grows  out  of  the  relation,  I  bid  you 
find  the  great  constructive  lines  of  the  true 
family,  and  under  the  power  of  Him  who 
thus  made  things,  apply  this  principle  to 
the  solution  of  your  practical  difficulties 
about  marriage  and  divorce.  He  seemed 
merely  to  answer  a  question  about  divorce, 
but,  as  usual  in  his  answers,  did  much 
more  ;  for  he  pointed  out  the  constituent 
elements  of  the  true  family,  beyond  which 
science  will  not  ever  go. 

early  neglect 

But  the  Christian  Church  has  tacitly 
assumed  that  her  Founder  gave  us  only  a 
doctrine  of  marriage  and  divorce.  She  has 
held,  too,  in  some  of  her  organizations, 
that  this  was  to  be  incorporated  into  her 
canons  and  forced  upon  the  legislation  of 
the  State.  Less  widely  the  Church  has 
been  content  to  keep  her  own  ecclesiastical 
law  and  practice  up  to  the  standard  of  the 
Gospels,  while,  in  the  language  of  Presi¬ 
dent  Woolsey,  she  virtually  has  said,  “  Law, 
a  patchwork  of  expedients,  needs  not  to 
conform  to  the  true  conception  of  human 
relations.”  And  a  portion  of  the  Christian 
world  has  either  questioned  both  of  these 
stricter  applications  of  the  ideal  of  Christ, 


4 


or  held  the  ideal  to  be  only  a  goal  to  be 
striven  towards  rather  than  a  measure  to  be 
applied,  either  in  the  rules  of  political 
order  or  the  discipline  of  ecclesiastical 
organizations.  Christianity  has  so  far  failed 
to  unite  in  maintaining  any  one  of  these 
theories  to  the  exclusion  of  the  others. 
The  practice  of  the  Church  is  accordingly 
widely  variant. 

The  method  pursued  by  the  Church  in 
the  application  of  the  principles  of  her 
Founder  needs  furthur  elucidation.  So  far 
as  I  can  learn,  the  early  Christians  did  not 
concern  themselves  about  the  family  as  an 
institution.  The  family  does  not  seem  to 
have  been  taken  as  their  point  of  view  in 
looking  at  the  many  and  urgent  practical 
domestic  questions  that  were  continually 
forced  upon  them.  Their  inquiries  almost 
invariably  took  another  direction.  They 
generally  simply  asked.  How  shall  we  con¬ 
duct  ourselves  in  this  or  that  relation  which 
we  hold  through  marriage  with  one  another 
or  with  unbelievers —  heathen,  as  we  mod¬ 
ern  people  often  call  all  such  ?  In  other 
words,  theirs  was  the  practical  problem  of 
individual  relationships,  with  no  clear  con¬ 
sciousness  of  a  social  institution  underneath 
and  including  them  all. 

To  the  student  of  the  structure  and 
growth  of  societies  this  attitude  toward  the 
subject  is  easily  explained.  A  new  religion, 
and  that  always  in  proportion  to  its  radical 
difference  in  principles  from  the  old  faiths 


5 


of  a  people,  is  necessarily  individualistic  in 
its  early  work,  especially  when  it  meets  an 
advanced  civilization.  For  at  first  it,  of 
necessity,  picks  its  converts  out  from  the  old 
faiths  one  by  one.  It  often  necessarily  sets 
the  members  of  a  household  at  variance  with 
each  other.  Only  in  case  of  a  strong  soli¬ 
darity  in  domestic  or  economic  life  can  it 
transfer  men  by  families  and  groups  to  the 
new  faith.  Mormonism,  Christian  missions 
in  foreign  countries,  and  the  old  society  of 
the  India  of  to-day  afford  many  illustrations 
of  this  sociological  fact.  That  Christianity 
appeals  strongly  to  the  individual  as  such  is 
true.  But  the  sociological  principle  to  which 
I  refer  is  also  a  powerful  factor  in  making 
this  its  actual  method.  In  the  light  of  social 
science  we  are  able  to  give  the  fact  its  fuller 
explanation,  and  thus  point  with  real  intel¬ 
ligence  to  the  actual  work  Christianity  has 
done  for  the  family,  find  its  true  value,  and 
then  see  how  the  future  part  of  it  must  go 
on. 

Lecky  calls  attention  to  the  remark  of 
Milman  concerning  the  early  Church,  that 
“  rarely,  if  ever,  in  the  discussions  of  the 
comparative  merits  of  marriage  and  celibacy, 
the  social  advantages  appear  to  have  occurred 
to  the  mind.  .  .  .  It  is  always  argued  with 
relation  to  the  interests  and  perfections  of 
the  individual  soul.”  An  examination  of 
the  writings  of  the  Ante-Nicene  Fathers  also 
fails  to  discover  any  considerable  reference 
to  the  family  as  a  social  institution  in  their 

6 


treatment  of  the  problems  of  domestic  mo¬ 
rality.  As  Milman  said  of  marriage,  it  was 
always  the  individual  and  the  duties  of  indi¬ 
viduals  that  were  put  to  the  front. 

This  statement  seems  to  hold  good  of  the 
family  and  of  the  canon  law  of  the  Western 
Church  regarding  the  family  in  relation  to 
marriage  and  divorce,  and  probably  it  is  also 
true  of  the  ecclesiastical  regulations  of  most 
Protestant  bodies.  Literature  treating  di¬ 
rectly  of  the  family  is  very  meagre.  When 
I  began  to  investigate  the  subject,  some 
twenty  years  ago,  I  was  startled  at  my  ina¬ 
bility  then  to  find  a  single  book  in  the  Eng¬ 
lish  language  —  save  one  on  the  Patriarchal 
Family,  and  that  was  of  no  scientific  value  — 
with  the  simple  title.  The  Family.  The 
subject  was  almost  as  rare  as  the  title. 
None  among  the  many  books  on  marriage 
and  divorce  at  that  time  approached  these 
subjects  with  any  recognition  of  them  as 
only  chapters  in  the  science,  law,  or  ethcis  of 
the  family.  The  word  family  ”  was  rarely 
used  in  anv  of  them.  In  fine,  the  family  is 
one  of  the  newest  problems  in  the  thought 
of  the  Christian  Church  and  in  science. 

Ulby  the  family  mas  Ignored 

I  have  pointed  to  the  chief  explanation  of 
this  in  respect  of  early  Christianity.  Let 
me  briefly  give  one  or  two  reasons  for  the 
ignoring  of  the  family  in  the  later  movement. 
When  Christianity  had  won  in  the  Empire, 
Roman  social  life,  and  consequently  Roman 


7 


law,  had  largely  lost  its  old  ideas  of  the 
family  and  its  correlative  idea  of  status. 
The  individual  and  its  necessary  correlative 
of  contract  had  come  in.  So  when  the 
methods  of  the  primitive  Christian  social 
development  met  those  of  a  decaying  civili¬ 
zation  —  a  social  condition  in  which  there 
seems  always  to  be  a  revival  of  individualism 
without  the  earlier  conserving  faith  —  and 
the  Church  borrowed  the  legal  forms  of  the 
times,  she  unconsciously  turned  her  influ¬ 
ence  into  channels  that  determined  still  more 
fixedly  her  own  later  ideas  upon  these  sub¬ 
jects;  for  the  later  individualistic  Roman 
law  was  naturally  used  to  shape  the  eccle¬ 
siastical  canons  of  the  times.  Here  was  one 
of  the  ways  in  which  the  Rome  of  the  early 
Christian  era  captured  the  Church  she  was 
forced  to  serve,  by  lending  to  it  her  own 
legal  institutions.  The  individualism  of  this 
later  Roman  law  captured  and  enslaved  the 
Church.  Fortunately,  though  with  tardy 
results,  early  Christianity  found  a  somewhat 
better  soil  for  her  domestic  ideas  in  the  for¬ 
ests  of  Germany  and  elsewhere,  where  do¬ 
mestic  institutions  were  in  some  respects  of 
a  type  nearer  to  nature,  to  which  Christ  had 
at  the  first  told  his  disciples  to  look  for  their 
principles  of  a  true  family,  and  where  these 
more  primitive  social  conditions  shaped  the 
law  of  the  family.  The  German  law  of 
marriage  of  our  day  has  been  built  up  by  a 
return  to  the  earlier  and  truer  type  of  Teu- 


8 


tonic  principles.  It  is  part  of  a  system  of 
family  law. 

The  Protestant  Reformation,  with  its 
reaction  from  the  Roman  Catholic  doctrine 
and  practice,  its  insistence  on  the  responsi¬ 
bility  of  the  individual,  and  its  aim  to  purify 
individual  morals,  did  less  than  it  otherwise 
would  have  done  to  correct  the  current 
working  theory  of  Christianity  regarding 
them;  for  the  Reformation  was  not  so  much 
social  as  individual  in  its  treatment  of  morals. 

Other  things  added  their  influence  to  that 
of  the  Reformation.  The  printing-press 
made  knowledge  free  to  all,  and  so  helped 
to  individualize  men.  The  discovery  of  a 
new  world,  the  methods  of  modern  science 
and  modern  invention,  greatly  added  to  the 
forces  that  made  for  individualism.  John 
Locke  may  be  singled  out  of  a  school  of 
thinkers  who  moulded  the  religious  life  of 
our  own  country  and  its  politics,  as  well  as 
that  of  other  countries,  for  upwards  of  a 
century.  Men  as  far  apart  as  Jonathan 
Edwards  and  Thomas  Jefferson  felt  his 
power.  The  “  Natural  Man  ”  of  Rousseau, 
who  was  the  political  apostle  of  Locke,  was 
an  individualized  savage,  whom  we  now 
know  to  be  the  pure  abstraction  of  a  specu¬ 
lative  philosophy;  though  he  long  filled  the 
minds  of  many.  But  the  theology  of 
Edwards,  in  modern  evangelism  and  modern 
politics,  absorbed  this  individualism,  or  ac¬ 
centuated  it  so  as  to  slough  off  its  intensest 
adherents  into  new  sects  in  Church  and  new 


9 


factions  in  politics  more  extreme  than  the 
bodies  they  had  left.  So  long  as  this  trend 
was  all  controlling,  the  larger  conception  of 
the  family  had  small  chance.  This  individ¬ 
ualism  was  unnoticed,  or  attacked,  when 
opposed  at  all,  chiefly  on  grounds  of  per¬ 
sonal  welfare  and  its  consequences  to  the 
State  through  the  weakened  public  morality 
it  produced. 

ttfbat  fja$  Been  Done. 

From  this  point  of  view  I  think  we  shall 
far  better  see  the  true  greatness  of  the  work 
which  Christianity  set  out  to  do  for  the  fam¬ 
ily.  The  achievements,  which  Dr.  Storrs 
and  others  have  put  into  popular  form,  are 
all  the  more  wonderful  when  we  come  to 
understand  the  great  limitations  under  which 
Christianity  has  wrought  most  of  this  time, 
and  which  she  has  accepted  for  one  reason 
and  another.  They  are  none  the  less  grand 
because  they  are  still  fragments  of  the  ulti¬ 
mate  work.  Christianity  has  done  a  noble 
task  for  the  family,  but  in  spite  of  her  bond¬ 
age  to  the  world  in  regard  to  the  theory  and 
principles  of  this  institution. 

And  now,  I  think,  Christianity,  in  this 
country  certainly,  has  been  led,  by  the 
seriousness  of  the  perils  of  our  domestic  life, 
and  by  contemporaneous  movements  of  life 
and  thought,  to  enter  with  considerably 
clearer  vision  upon  what  may  be  called  a  new 
epoch  in  its  treatment  of  the  family.  The 
war  of  1 86 1  gave  us  new  ideas  of  national 


10 


unity,  as  something  organic  and  not  to  be 
explained  on  the  individualistic  notions  of 
contract.  State  rights  then  became  subordi¬ 
nate  to  National  relations.  Within  the  same 
decade  or  so  we  began  to  use  the  new 
methods  of  historical  and  comparative  juris¬ 
prudence.  These  methods  were  not  only 
fatal  to  the  claims  of  the  contract  theory  of 
the  origin  of  social  institutions,  but  they 
helped  us  to  see  something  of  the  power  of 
the  family  in  shaping  early  life  and  law. 
Theories  of  evolution  had  been  also  germi¬ 
nating,  and  began  to  be  applied  in  the  study 
of  the  history  and  nature  of  human  society. 
And,  meanwhile,  similar  methods  of  study, 
the  longing  for  historic  truth  and  some  or¬ 
ganic  expression  in  outward  conduct  for 
the  growing  unity  of  life,  found  vigorous 
expression. 

Che  new  Opportunity. 

In  this  last  social  ferment  Christianity  is 
fast  becoming  alive  to  its  new  opportunity 
regarding  the  family.  The  universities,  and 
scholars  outside  them,  are  creating  a  litera¬ 
ture  and  science  of  the  subject,  both  for  the 
scientific  value  of  the  family  and  home  in 
themselves,  and  for  the  necessity  of  this 
knowledge  to  the  comprehension  of  sociol¬ 
ogy.  The  theological  schools  and  colleges 
are  awake  to  its  importance,  both  for  the 
clergy  and  for  the  men  and  women  of  ordi¬ 
nary  liberal  education.  The  Sunday  school 
has  begun  to  see  its  own  great  opportunity 


ii 


for  the  use  of  the  family  in  its  Home  De¬ 
partment,  which  is  now  rapidly  growing  in 
numbers  and  power.  And  lastly,  Christian 
philanthropy  is  turning  its  attention  to  the 
home  as  the  source  of  much  of  the  poverty, 
crime,  and  intemperance  of  the  people,  and 
as  worthy  of  infinitely  more  attention  than 
it  has  yet  received  for  its  preventive  and  re¬ 
cuperating  forces.  All  this  will  tell  more 
and  more  on  public  law,  which  surely 
though  slowly  responds  to  the  changes  of 
social  life. 

That  Christianity  has  done  a  work  for  the 
family  of  unspeakable  value  occasions  deep 
gratitude,  and  our  thankfulness  will  not  be 
the  less  for  our  recognition  of  the  limitations 
that  have  hitherto  restricted  her  successes. 
But  a  far  better,  a  far  more  inspiring,  thought 
may  be  found  in  our  recognition  of  her 
coming  emancipation  from  the  bondage  of 
the  past,  as  that  has  kept  her  from  seeing  the 
real  problem  as  it  is  now  presented  for  her 
study,  and  from  her  early  entrance  upon  new 
conquests.  The  lessons  of  history  are  only 
half  learned  unless  they  help  us  to  estimate 
correctly  the  present  and  direct  us  to  the 
future.  What  Christianity  has  done  for  the 
family  should  help  us  to  see  what  it  is  now 
about  to  do  in  order  to  conserve  and  extend 
the  conquests  of  the  past. 

Auburndale ,  Mass. 


12 


